A week from today, one of the most popular websites on the internet will go dark. Reddit, the current king of all social media sites due to its massive, influential community and ability to send out hundreds of thousands of hits to a single post, is doing its part to help stop internet censorship law SOPA with a display of force.

The decision to black out the site for a period of 12 hours next Wednesday comes in the wake of the announcement that Reddit co-founder Alexis "kn0thing" Ohanian is heading to Congress to testify on behalf of the tech community. He's of the firm position that SOPA could potentially "obliterate" the entire tech industry, a position I strongly agree with.

The Reddit blackout is perhaps the greatest "money where your mouth is" moment in the entire anti-SOPA campaign so far, as moving domains away from SOPA supporter GoDaddy can only accomplish so much. It's an unavoidable message that will reach all the users that have allowed Reddit to become a two billion page view a month website.

But unfortunately, it's not enough, and I worry the blackout may be preaching to the choir. Chances are if you're a regular Reddit user, you're either tech savvy enough to know the dangers of SOPA, or if not, you've at least been reading about it on the site's front page for months.

Rather, even though Reddit is a massive site, the industry needs a nuclear option to truly decimate SOPA once and for all. Titans like Google and Facebook need to have a similar blackout, which would reach an audience far, far wider than Reddit's.

For as much as I've been writing about SOPA, and getting great responses from other tech people online, Joe Citizen still doesn't seem to have much of a clue about it, and if he does know it exists, he has little idea what it could actually mean for the fate of the internet.

That's where a Google/Facebook blackout would have the power to instantly crush SOPA. If the sites went dark and instead linked to pages explaining the problems with SOPA, and then had links for people to contact Congress, I guarantee it would be the killing blow for the bill. National news agencies which have largely been avoiding covering SOPA because their parent companies support it would be forced to report on the topic, as Facebook and Google going offline would undoubtedly be the biggest tech story of the day, week, month, or possibly the year.

Is it absolutely necessary? I'm not sure. It would definitely amount to a significant revenue loss for each company, and in Google's case, every website out there that relies on search traffic would take a hit. But you could argue that for the long term safety of the internet, it would absolutely be worth it.

I have a hunch that when the leaders of the "internet industry" as it were, get to Capitol Hill, they'll have the ability to talk clueless lawmakers out of supporting the bill, and I still don't believe that relatively tech-friendly President Obama would sign such a piece of legislation into law should it somehow pass. But if we're going for a better safe than sorry approach, a blackout of the internet's biggest sites would seal the deal automatically, and we could be free of this nonsense for good.